It’s easy to say both sides do it and they’re all the same because often those clichés are true — that’s how they became clichés. But have we become so cynical, so intellectually lazy, so unable to tell right from wrong that we really believe that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are equivalent?

Hillary is not perfect — no candidate is perfect. But Trump is more corrupt and dishonest than any major party presidential candidate in our lifetime. The media likes to tell a story, and the story of a qualified candidate with mainstream ideas running against an utterly unqualified, bigoted, hateful candidate is not much of a story. So now we’re seeing a false equivalence, as if both candidates are equally flawed. That’s just wrong.

Jay Michaelson explains that while there is good reason not to trust Trump, on the Clinton side, the evidence against her is “mostly smoke and mirrors.”

Do you pick someone who’s under federal investigation for using a private email server?

Or do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about committing sexual assault, was accused by 12 women of committing sexual assault, said some of those women weren’t attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased because his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes, stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation, has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent’s looks, insulted an opponent’s wife’s looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the…?

To vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe; cutting one’s throat to lower one’s blood pressure.

Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter, Yuval Rabin, writes that she is convinced that Hillary Clinton has “more than proved [her] loyalty to not only to Rabin and his memory but even more so to Israel’s security and well-being,” and she asks that we watch a short video on the right.

If Donald Trump wins next week’s elections, which he might, America will have chosen as its leader a self-centered, misogynistic rabble-rouser, whose nasty bluster should have doomed his candidacy in its infancy. It will have confused the skills required to succeed in reality television with the skills required to succeed in reality.

The Economistendorsement of Hillary mentioned that Trump “would be a terrible president” and that “his ideas on revenue and spending are an affront to statistics.”

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About Steve Sheffey

Steve Sheffey, has long been active in the pro-Israel community and in Jewish communal life in Chicago. He served on the Board of CityPAC, Chicago’s premier pro-Israel political action committee, for seven years, including two years as its President. Steve served as an elected delegate from the 10th Congressional District of Illinois to the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He is married and has three children.